Y’know, people say that motorbike racing in videogames is a niche concept, appealing only to the miniscule section of the market that’s already fans of whatever championship or brand is licensed. Said people are clearly fools, missing out on material far more suited to the videogame form than your regular automobile action through blind prejudice alone. More often than not, two-wheeled competition quickly becomes gaming’s Dr. Pepper once the initial handling shock is overcome, due to rocket-like acceleration (and therefore instant race intensity) and the fact that you can’t just go batting everyone else off the track to assume pole position.

Although the game is really only a slight refinement of its predecessor (MotoGP 3: Ultimate Racing Technology for the original Xbox), there’s still plenty for race fans to get their teeth into here. Once again, proceedings are split down the middle into two distinct modes entitled ‘Grand Prix’ and ‘Extreme’. The former offers players the chance to re-enact the 2005 or 2006 seasons of MotoGP from the comfort of their own living rooms. All the usual suspects are here: the full 17-track roster, the ability to prepare the nuts and bolts of your bike for each successive race, the full set of sponsors’ logos plastered to every available surface - you know the drill. The latter game mode, however, offers a conciliatory hand to those who think that all the tinkering involved in modern-day racing is part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. It does this through the inclusion of an additional 17-tracks inspired by notable urban and countryside areas of MotoGP host countries, as well as a few randoms. These discard the tight, technical sections of the officially licensed tracks in favour of blistering speed, large sudden elevation changes and the kind of scenery that makes you remember those old Rise Of The Robots renders and laugh yourself silly. Truly gorgeous stuff. Burning through the lush Low Country course, you’ll swear you’re stepping into a time machine, taking a glimpse at how OutRun 2006’s Tulip Garden will look in HD, staring agog at its lush greenery, babbling brooks and really quite unnecessary amount of windmills. The Malay course is also quite stunning – when assuming the camera position directly behind (but furthest away from) your rider, a misplaced blink will have you thinking the whole thing’s a long, helicopter shot from Apocalypse Now or Platoon. Some of the vegetation quite simply looks good enough to eat. It’s largely the same story on the urban front, too. Tokyo’s skyline, permeated by glass shards hundreds of feet tall and road networks that resemble the wires behind our telly at one end and pagodas inside beautifully cultivated gardens at the other, showcase just how well Climax has caricatured each country within just a couple of miles of track. All of this detail, of course, just heightens the sense of speed the game already had in spades. A slight cautionary word must be spoken about the few tracks surrounded more closely by buildings of various sorts, however. Here, it becomes painfully apparent that the architecture, in fact, isn’t modelled to the inch (as it appears from a distance), but has simply had higher resolution textures applied to quite simplistic boxes. Buildings hundreds of years old in real life remain unweathered and square, windows look simply painted onto side walls – in short, everything’s a bit flat from close range. Not a huge problem when you’re burning rubber at a thousand miles an hour, but it’s certainly a worrying tick in the ‘cynical update’ box, nonetheless.

In each of the two gameplay modes, seasons are played out against a roster of superstars, either fictional or real, with experience credits handed out for good race performance. These can then be spent on increasing your stats in four key areas: cornering, braking top speed and acceleration. Before qualifying and taking part in each race, a handful of credit-scoring challenges can also be attempted, which are usually shortlength time trials or exercises in staying close on the tail of your rivals. Fairly yawn-tastic, but there’s no reason they can’t simply be ignored. Completists however, might wish to indulge in them in order to improve their seeding, a player-specific stat constantly updated based upon how many experience credits have been earned, which is then used to match players of roughly equal ability in (potentially 16-player) Xbox Live races. Thrilling stuff, indeed.

All this talk of arcade thrills is not to say that there isn’t ample opportunity for a technical or creative genius to enjoy themselves. Extreme mode championship races earn the usual surfeit of virtual dollars that can then be spent on a number of upgrades to your fantasy bikes. Ultimately offering quite an appreciable increase in your bike’s performance, these are structured in three stages to prevent the greatest power falling into novice hands, requiring the first two levels to be bought before the final one can be accessed. As ever, the overall structure’s pretty simple, with only a handful of variables, including brake composition and weight reduction treatment – it’s certainly more about refinement than requirement. Adding to the performance side of things is a simplistic but satisfying livery editor, offering the chance to show your creative skills to the entire world. This includes a number of preset helmet, bike and leather designs to those who wouldn’t just prefer the whole shebang to be kitted out in one colour. There's also the opportunity to design a tasteful logo to plaster over your machine and costume, built from an ample amount of preexisting emblem templates. Again, we’re not talking about an encyclopedic level of depth here, but it’s a welcome extra.

Extreme mode’s nod towards arcade fun is a necessary one due to the absolutely punishing (and sim-orientated) nature of the handling. Setting aside how the controls are physically assigned to the pad, the first few hours of play are almost invariably spent making steering error after steering error – it’s a feeling not unlike trying to find your sea legs on a ferry crossing. It’s not that you need to brake ridiculously early, or even that your analogue stick movement needs to be all that precise, it’s just that once you begin to turn even an inch in either direction you’ve committed yourself, with an inevitable trip to the gravel trap as your reward for bad judgment. Therefore, each race is a somewhat tense affair demanding careful thought as to just how much you want to gain that fraction of a second on the guy in front when there’s so much to lose if you make a mistake. In time, though, you’ll come to realise that behind the realistic veneer lies a control mechanic that actually shares quite a bit with the likes of OutRun, in as far as there are only two types of turn – ones that you must take at full-pelt and ones that you'll need to brake quite significantly for – and after that it’s simply a case of perfecting your timing. Eventually then, all the hard work you’ll have put in will be rewarded by a lap where your tyres never leave the asphalt, and from there, you’ll never look back.

Sadly though, this perfect balance is thrown out a little by the great frequency with which ‘accidental’ collisions occur. In the heat of battle, no competitor is ever willing to give an inch to accommodate someone straying from the racing line, so you’ll often overtake an AI opponent at a corner only to see their natural line out of the bend go straight through your back wheel. Strangely, your opponents seem always to suffer the least from such collisions, which only serves to frustrate further. However, the nature of two-wheeled racing means every inch of track is a possible passing place, so dusting yourself off and carrying on always seems the best (and most enjoyable) option. There’s a few seconds of invincibility after crashing this time around, where last time you were placed right in front of oncoming traffic, giving you at least a fair chance.

Ultimately what matters in a game such as this is the sense of speed created, and a fair control mechanic that rewards sustained effort with some kind of noticeable improvement in performance. To calm any worries, MotoGP URT ’06 delivers the former by the pantload (even outside of the frankly terrifying cockpit viewpoint), whilst the random crashes, in the end, do very little to damage the latter, so all’s well there. Although some of the scenery can be a bit bland, you’re never looking at one part of it long enough to care – though the display can jerk, now and then, on 1080i. Such technical arguments pale into insignificance when you actually play however, as you become utterly convinced you’re clinging for dear life onto some wild, petroleum-guzzling beast. And isn’t that, dear reader, what matters most?

Dave Shaw